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Rustum Kozain
Groundwork
Kwela Books/Snailpress
for Hetta
Crouching
deep in our jagged-dagger dreaming,
we find a thick-cloaked skeleton
of the sunrises that were never to be,
whose impatient roar
we must now explain.
– Khulile Nxumalo, ‘The Great Discount’
Regret
I am regret, that slow vulture
that comes too late,
that skirts the congregation,
the carcass well past use,
a wrong choice long forgotten
that passes now
as abstract of history,
malleable to anyone’s interest, or mine,
picked at, turned over and over,
until its shrivelled tendons –
dry as bone –
turn white, then fine as ash
soon taken by the wind.
That regret, the slow vulture
that came too late,
that must itself die
but lives as shadow,
a shade that flaps
inside the head’s chambers
where I leave the unsaid unsaid,
conjuring instead
the absent word
into that old, old flinch.
I am that regret.
This is the sea
After a photograph by Victor Dlamini
There is that sea, deep sometimes
as the heart at dusk,
the shine on its face soon to fade.
There is that caravel drifting in
and all it brings: a load of good
and the bad unreckoned by the quartermaster.
The homing birds that come or go.
The sun that’s set,
now only a shade smudged by fog.
From empty rooms, frosting windows,
no one saw
its dying spectacle.
There is something of this sea –
its cold and darkening deep –
in the human heart, in me,
that lies unfathomed,
beyond all sounding,
that does not know its own dark treachery.
Storytelling
Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted,
except precisely by saying that one retracts it.
– Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’
In indecision we drive a block,
then stop at the end of my cul-de-sac
to look at passing cars, graffito tags
on vibracrete, and curious neighbours.
The sun draws water, a seagull
flies its sorties looking to scavenge,
a skittish lemoenduif
launches in fright from a garden wall.
We try again with logic to loosen
a knot, our complication: you
will stay with your lover;
I will return to waiting
for that empty click of the snug fit
and the faculty of abstract nouns –
love, death, God. And time
that will not freeze. I speak as if
I can speak, presume, and speak for you.
You flash with anger. Like a child
I wish I could reel back time,
turn it all back by the one click
needed to return words to inchoate limbo;
to watch again curious neighbours;
to watch again a skittish dove
launch in fright from its garden wall;
to look again at you in sunlight;
or regard our complication, this complication
we call our bodies that we’ve flung
into the same orbit, one, two, several times.
Nothing can be more complicated
than this. Or more simple. Nothing
is more simple than the spangle
of two bodies hanging in orbit, in sunlight.
But no. My words now float
somewhere in suspension,
unthought colloids
troubling the last sunlight behind you,
the bright frame of the car window
darkening; you, cross-legged
in the driver’s seat. And cloud
as the day fails and dusk deepens
to purple, then prussian. The roads
sudden trails of light and busy
with weekenders, cars filled
with youth who still roar from windows
in their agony of looking for trouble.
The roads and the world and all that backfires
counted and catalogued
in my book of the dead . . . I tell you
of a moment’s suspension, the dark
strong grip of my father’s hand
as my own fails on a mossy ledge –
a child for a moment hanging free
and who sees in his father’s eyes
something beyond the human:
it is this look that saves him,
something in the father’s eyes
that softens from surprise and anger;
and framed by the coal-dark face
against grey winter cloud.
The father caught finally
recognising his role.
But that is one moment, one click
and the years will darken
like they do between father and child.
You